Various medical apparatuses, which detect and analyze various physiological parameters of patients, are used in medical establishments. These may be, for example, blood pressure, body temperature, the oxygen saturation in the blood, carbon dioxide concentration in the breathing gas, etc. Rapid recognition of critical patient values and malfunctions of the apparatuses must take place in intensive care, in particular. The users of the apparatuses are alerted to these critical states by means of alarms. All these apparatuses have signal units for the visual or audio indication of an alarm and have an alarm handling of their own. Above all, the acknowledgment of the alarm states take place directly at the apparatus. A plurality of apparatuses may trigger an alarm independently from one another at the same time in critical situations of the patient. The alarms must be acknowledged or turned off individually at the apparatuses. In acute situations, in which rapid response is mandatory, there frequently is no time for turning off the individual alarms. The result is a cacophony of alarms, which further increases the stress of the medical staff.
A device for monitoring of medical apparatuses, in which the signals of the individual alarms of one apparatus are converted into understandable speech texts, is known from DE 33 02 321 A1.
In such a monitoring device, all alarm states of the individual apparatus are communicated to a monitoring person. However, a workstation in an intensive care unit has a plurality of medical patient monitoring devices, which can signal a correspondingly large number of alarms. The monitoring person receives all existing alarms independently of their importance. When alarms appear simultaneously, delays may occur in perception on the part of the monitoring person, because the alarm signals must first be converted into the corresponding speech text. A vitally important alarm signal pertaining to the patient may thus only be recognized with a delay.